She smelled rotten meat and an odor that reminded her of a swamp.
Err-err-err-err-err-err-uhh-uhh-uhh-err.
It was inside the cave with them.
III
It felt like they were ripping her limb from limb. Hart’s screams degenerated into sobs of anguish and agony.
The male shrieked and the others scurried back up to their perch on the ledge, where they shuffled nervously. The male grunted from mere inches in front of her face.
Hart raised her head, but couldn’t even see him right in front of her. His breath smelled of rotten fruit and decay. His musk was even stronger than before.
He grunted and tapped her injured shoulder.
She flinched.
He hopped away from her and shrieked.
Shuffling and grunting sounds from above her.
The male slapped his palms on the ground and the others fell silent. Hart heard his heavy breathing and the scraping sounds of his cautious approach.
She scooted slowly away from him as quietly as she could. There was nowhere to go. She could only hope that since she couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see her.
He grabbed her wrist, but she jerked it out of his grasp and scooted faster. He grabbed it again and wrenched it upward.
They both screamed at once.
He released her arm and hooted as he scampered backward.
Comprehension dawned with a gasp of surprise.
Her arm. She carefully raised her elbow. Brought it forward and back. Rolled her shoulder in the socket.
These creatures she had thought of as animals had rationalized the situation, determined that she was injured, and had communicated as much to one another. They’d evaluated her threat level and made a conscious decision to help her, even knowing that by doing so they potentially increased the risk to themselves.
Hart sat quietly in the absolute darkness, listening to them crawl over the rocks, feeling them watching her through means she could only speculate. She came to a decision she knew on a primal level would shape her destiny.
She slowly rose to her knees, raised her arms out to each side, and bowed her head.
“Whaah.”
It emerged as little more than a whisper and the intonation was all wrong, but she repeated it until it almost sounded right.
Minutes passed in silence. She couldn’t even hear the subtle sounds of their breathing or movement from the ledge above her. She feared she’d frightened them and they’d silently dispersed into the darkness. Still, she persevered.
“Whaah.”
She heard a shuffling sound, far closer to her than she expected. The first one, the male . . . he’d been standing mere feet away the entire time. She could sense his indecision, the electrical sensation of fear crackling from him like a live wire. And then she felt his hand on her head, felt it tremble as he stroked her hair.
Whaah!
Several seconds passed before a chorus of others answered his call. They bounded down from the rocks and swarmed over her. They all placed their hands on her. Rubbed the contours of her wetsuit. Tugged her hair and pulled on her fingers and toes. Pinched and prodded and crawled onto her back. All while she let her head hang and cried tears of pure joy.
She prayed the moment would never end.
The male screamed and started shoving the others off of her. They grunted and squealed and bounded up the rocks.
He grabbed Hart’s hair, raised her face to meet his, and screamed directly into it. Spittle struck her forehead and eyes and she braced for the attack she thought she’d averted.
A full minute passed, during which she calculated her odds of surviving a fall from this height.
She felt his finger on her face, felt it trace the contours of her cheekbone from the corner of her eye to her chin. He removed his finger and made a slurping sound when he tasted her tears.
Whah-ah!
The others screeched, hopped up and down, and slapped their hands on the stone.
Before Hart could make sense of what was transpiring, she was being ushered uphill. Pushed and pulled over boulders and through crevices. She couldn’t see a blasted thing. Her hands shook as they slid across the smooth rock, seeking the surest grip, and still she continually slipped and skidded back down, but every time they caught her before she tumbled out of reach. She focused on keeping solid ground underneath her and prayed they weren’t leading her to her death.
By the time she reached the top, her hands were trembling so badly they were all but useless to her. Blood flowed from cuts on her fingertips and knuckles. The Thermoprene on her knees was tattered and damp from the lacerations on her knees. She could hear them scurrying all around her, yet still she couldn’t bring herself to even attempt to stand. Without the use of her sense of sight, she was completely and utterly helpless. And that was the most terrifying thing of all.
There was screeching and grunting everywhere. The intonation was almost playful. She even heard the occasional laugh, which made her giggle every time.
Hart tried to gather her bearings. While she had no idea what lay ahead, she knew exactly what was behind her and understood that distancing herself from it was the safest course of action. She kept the ledge directly behind her and crawled as straight away from it as she could. The way their calls echoed behind her was different from the sound ahead of her, which suggested she was crawling from a larger space into a much smaller one.
She heard fluid spattering against stone and felt warmth on her bare knee. She had to remind herself that despite their surprising level of intelligence, they were still wild animals and she couldn’t afford to let down her guard. Although bonobos demonstrated great affection for the humans living in their midst, she’d seen one fly into a blind rage and attack researchers for attempting to remove the dead body of one of the group’s elders. They’d been forced to tranquilize her, and even then she’d fought right up until the second she lost consciousness. And those were people who’d been living beside her for decades, not a species of hominin they’d never seen before, one that simply appeared from nowhere.
She struck the top of her head on something in her way and cursed herself for leaving her helmet behind.
There were hands on her almost immediately.
“I’m okay.”
The simian shrieked and bounded away.
She reached up and felt for whatever blocked her way. The flowstone was cold and damp and maybe the width of her shoulders. She identified it as a column and used it to pull herself to her feet. She traced the imperfections in the stone, which seemed to guide her fingertips. It wasn’t until she felt the contours of a face that she recognized it as one of the sculptures they’d first seen upon entering the maze of caverns, only now she visualized it for what it truly was: one of these magnificent creatures. If this species was capable of artistic expression, then what other feats of intellect . . .
Her fingertips grazed the bared teeth of the sculpture. She positively felt the ferocity radiating from it. This wasn’t a piece in a museum gallery; it was a warning meant to frighten something, although she couldn’t think of a single species that could see in darkness like this, at least not with its eyes.
A hand closed over hers and gently removed it from the savage face. The fingers were disproportionately short compared to the length of the palm and the skin was thick and leathery. There was something almost human about the gesture, a tenderness she could only ascribe to a higher order of sentience. It guided her around the column and deeper into a cavern that grew noticeably warmer with each step. She waved her hand in front of her as she navigated a veritable colonnade of similarly sculpted pillars. She was reminded of the Terracotta Warriors in the buried vaults of Xi’an, the Tula warrior pillars of the Toltec, and the gauntlet of warriors that guarded the Mayan Plaza of the Thousand Columns, all of which were designed to protect something of great value.
Hart was so lost in thought that she didn’t notice the smell. Not at first, anyway. Once she did, though,
it overwhelmed her.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
The animal screamed and jerked on her hand.
That smell. She’d know it anywhere and in any of its incarnations. It brought back memories of Borneo and the Congo. It was the smell of soil and humidity, of blooming flowers and blossoming plants, of fruit ripening in the trees and moldering on the detritus.
It was the smell of the jungle. There was no mistaking it.
A faint violet glow materialized from the darkness, so faint that at first she attributed it to her mind playing tricks on her. The light grew incrementally brighter in the distance and framed an oval orifice from which intricate chandelier speleothems hung. The shapes of the creatures around her gradually appeared in silhouette, like ghosts taking form from the ether. There were maybe seven of them, all walking on two legs. They swayed as they wended between the columns, upon which the purple aura limned the features of the warriors. The faces were so lifelike she could almost hear the screams of those with their mouths wide open and hear the grunts of those with their jaws thrust forward.
The chittering and shrieking ceased as they approached the orifice and their procession closed rank. The male took the lead and hopped up onto a jagged rock. The others stopped and the one holding her hand gave a sharp tug.
The male rose to his full height, took a deep breath, and doubled over as he released a scream louder than any she’d ever heard a primate make. It echoed away from them into the distance, where it reverberated for several seconds before dissipating into the silence. The male stood silhouetted against the tunnel, which stretched a good thirty feet deeper into the earth, toward the origin of the light, where massive dark shapes faded in and out of the darkness in a way that reminded her of the upper canopy of the jungle in the moments before sunrise.
Another scream answered from far away. It echoed around her before dying amid the columns.
The male bounded down from the rock and loped through the tunnel. The others resumed their travel calls as they followed. Hart watched the shapes take form in the distance. They were definitely trees. There was no doubt about it, but how . . . ?
Hart emerged from the tunnel into a world beyond her imagination, one that suddenly filled with screams.
IV
“Over here!” Payton called.
Nabahe raised his headlamp toward the sound of the voice. Payton stood diagonally above them up the steep, rocky slope, holding something Nabahe didn’t recognize from the distance.
“What did you find?”
Nabahe ducked out from underneath Thyssen’s arm and helped him lean against a boulder. The color had drained from his face and his eyes had taken on a bruised appearance. The bandages were no match for his wounds. His hands were red with blood, which dribbled from his fingertips. He transferred more and more of his weight to Nabahe’s shoulders with every step. Nabahe couldn’t help but look up at the treacherous slope and wonder if they’d soon reach a point where they’d be forced to split up if they hoped to escape.
“Go on,” Thyssen said. “I’ll catch up.”
Nabahe heard the truth in the man’s voice, but nodded and turned his back on him anyway. He scurried uphill through a narrow crevice and found himself on a ledge so narrow he was hesitant to even attempt to stand.
Payton braced himself against the stone embankment and stared toward the top of the incline. A helmet hung from his hand. It was pitted and scarred, but there was no blood, at least none that Nabahe could see. His light had been steadily dimming for the last hour or so, although he wasn’t prepared to admit as much, even to himself.
“Do you think—?”
“No,” Payton interrupted. “The helmet was unclasped. She must have taken it off on her own. Maybe she lost her grip on it and it fell down here.”
Nabahe swept his beam across the ground at Payton’s feet. The absence of blood didn’t necessarily mean there hadn’t been a struggle. He’d lived in the desert long enough to be able to read the stories the ground told, maybe not well enough to interpret them, but certainly well enough to get the gist. The scuff marks in the dust and scattered pebbles, the smudged footprints and scored rock all spoke of a physical confrontation, one whose outcome—
His light settled upon an impression in the dust. It was a partial print at best, but the impressions were distinct.
“You don’t suppose she’d have any reason to take off her shoes, do you?”
Payton glanced down at him with an expression of confusion that vanished when he saw what Nabahe had found. He knelt and brushed at the edges with his fingertips. The ball of the foot was clear, as were two of the toes, one of which almost looked like it was bent totally sideways and had been used to grasp the ledge.
“She was right,” Payton said.
“We need to catch up with her,” Nabahe said. He chose not alert Payton to the fact that there’d been a struggle. The idea of pushing on with a renewed sense of urgency was more than a little appealing, though. After narrowly escaping whatever the hell that thing had been by climbing into the narrow chute, they couldn’t move fast enough for him.
“I’ll scout ahead,” Payton said. He glanced downhill at Thyssen. “Do what you can with him.”
“I don’t know how much farther he can go.”
“We’ll deal with that when we have to.”
“And when we do?”
Payton looked at him for a long moment, his expression indecipherable from the shadows hiding his face. He started climbing without another word, leaving Nabahe to pick his way back down the slope to where Thyssen had slid down the rock to his haunches. He peered up at Nabahe from a face drenched with sweat.
“She’s dead, you know.”
Nabahe offered his hand and helped Thyssen to his feet. He draped the man’s arm around his neck and did his best to find balance for both of them.
“The ancient Hopi believed that when the Earth was new, all of the people and animals lived beneath its surface. There were four worlds, one above and three below. It was in the darkness of the bottommost world that all life began. Their ancestors ascended from one level to the next until they emerged into the Fourth World, beneath the watchful eye of the Sun Spirit, Sawa, their creator. On the surface, however, Masauwu, the Spirit of Death, ruled. And so the Hopi came to accept that the price of living was that they must always be in the presence of death, and thus wasted none of their precious time in the sun worrying about something that was every bit as much a part of their lives as the air they breathed.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s no sun down here.”
Thyssen slipped and they both fell to their knees. Nabahe grimaced and fought through the pain to drag them both over the next crest. The slope only grew steeper, but it almost looked as though there was a trail that wended up between the rocks.
“Your research and mine aren’t so different,” Thyssen said. “The science might be anecdotal in the eyes of some, yet the vast majority of human knowledge can be traced to oral traditions. Maybe there is no god of thunder riding his chariot across the sky or a supreme being who hurls lightning bolts from the clouds. One must weed the belief from the garden of fact in order to lay bare the truth, whether or not one chooses to accept it. Is it coincidental that nearly every indigenous tribe’s story of creation begins with a journey from the underworld? Is it so much harder to believe that those tales could be true than that humans magically appeared in an idyllic garden with a talking snake? The stories that predate modern religion, that were old long before the first scrolls were pressed, share more commonalities than all of the doctrines marketed as the word of various monotheistic gods.”
“In my experience, belief defines one’s reality.”
“Yet just because one believes something fervently enough doesn’t necessarily make it so. Proof is the currency of fact. Look at the evolution of humankind. We have physical evidence that traces modern humans’ origin through literally dozens of physical incarnations to
a common shared lineage with apes. We can track the migration of Homo sapiens from Africa to Asia, and ultimately to the edge of the Arctic Circle and down through the Americas. We’ve found evidence of habitation in caves from Beringia to Antarctica, evidence that proves there was a mass migration during the Last Glacial Maximum. But none of that evidence proves this mass migration happened aboveground. Why would protohumans choose to travel through the snow and ice in sub-zero temperatures when there were plentiful resources in Africa and Asia, closer to the warmth of the equator? Why would we assign such counterintuitive thought processes to even primitive people, when our species’ greatest evolutionary triumph has been the continuous increase in cranial capacity? Would not the Arctic be full of the frozen carcasses of migrating primates if that were the case?”
Nabahe was beginning to feel like he was dragging Thyssen. The man stumbled with nearly every step. Payton was already near the top, his crawling silhouette limned by his headlamp.
“Assigning thoughts to apes is no more reasonable than believing they were created by an omnipotent being,” Nabahe said.
“I’m talking about instinct, not cognitive ability. Any animal exposed to the cold will seek warmth. That’s basic physiology. Self-preservation prevents such suicidal risks, especially in baser animals.”
“Were that the case, Columbus never would have found the New World.”
“You’re speaking of individuals; I’m talking about entire species,” Thyssen said. “Whole populations don’t set out on journeys that ultimately lead to their extinction. I believe that our ancestors made the journey underground, where they were spared from the elements, tunnels from which they emerged only when they were confident they would be able to comfortably sustain themselves. Tell me that doesn’t mesh with your theories. I’ve read your work. We share the same beliefs, you and I.”
Payton shined his beam down at them from the top. The added light allowed Nabahe to focus more on what was ahead than on where he was planting his feet. The final leg was the steepest, but once he was within reach, Payton would be able to help him with Thyssen.
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